Genji
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Genji is with you

We love Overwatch. So we assembled 22 of our best writers and set them to work—a writer to jump into the skin (or robotic shell) of each character. The result is 22 odes. You can use the “Overwatch odes” tag to leaf through them all, or use the handy list at the bottom of this post. /// “You may call yourself my brother,” says Hanzo, Overwatch’s longbow-using sniper to his cyborg sibling, Genji. “But you are not the Genji I knew.” He shakes his head with disappointment, struggling with ideals that are as old and out-of-place in this future world…

LowPolyScenes
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Iconic movie moments turned into gorgeous low-poly scenes

Brazilian artist Bruno Alberto is a man on a mission: take every movie you loved from your childhood, pick a scene from it, and turn it into a gorgeous low-poly animated diorama. So far, Alberto has only shared four on his LowPolyScenes Facebook page, but boy, they are a good four. Let’s start with his rendering of Free Willy (1994), which obviously depicts the scene where a henchman eats popcorn evil-y… OK, I may be lying. What other scene would you pick from this movie aside from the one where Willy, as promised, finally goes free? It’s a bit sped up, but everything…

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Los Santos Pride mod gives GTA a much-needed queering

Notice: Discussion of homo/trans/biphobia /// “Almost fooled me, bro-she!” says Grand Theft Auto V (2013) protagonist Franklin while passing by a group of trans women. “He’s so deep in the closet, his friends call him mothballs!” yells the game’s parody of Simon Cowell at a contestant on his singing competition. “Post Op: No Longer Just Mail” says the side of one of the game’s UPS stand-in brown delivery trucks as it drives by. Grand Theft Auto V has about one of the most open worlds in gaming, but in jokes like these, much of that world is made inaccessible for all…

Tahira
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Tahira, a sci-fi epic that will question our violent histories this August

Before the imperialism of the 19th century, or the World Wars of the 20th, there were the Crusades: a series of military campaigns in the Middle-East between the 11th and 15th centuries. During these campaigns, various Christian European powers sent large numbers of well-equipped men to what was dubbed the Holy Land to fight against local inhabitants, as well as the largely Muslim Turks, who would eventually become the Ottoman Empire. They were fought for a number of reasons: to capture Jerusalem, to help the Byzantine Empire maintain control of its lands, arguably to attempt to reunite Eastern Christians with…

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The game about female sexuality that Apple wouldn’t touch

La Petite Mort is a smartphone game about timing, communication, and being generous. It’s also a game about sex, female pleasure, and sensuality. As is expected with pretty much any game about female sexuality, Apple rejected La Petite Mort for publication on its App Store on the grounds that it was inappropriate. The Denmark-based developer Lovable Hat Cult, who made the game, told me that even though Apple claimed to show support for the game’s themes of generous love, it still refused to publish a game that explores these concepts through sexual content. However, this raises a question: is it possible to…

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New videogame asks: do we really need academics to study videogames?

When I was born late into 1990, the Super Nintendo had already been released in its home country of Japan. Over here in the States, Super Mario Bros. (1985) had already been entertaining my parents for years. Pong (1972) had entertained my pastor, and Tron (1982) had already hit theaters to the collective “meh” of audiences worldwide. As such, I have only ever known a world with videogames. But it’s worth pointing out that, relative to text or music or even film, videogames are still a fairly new medium. And as with any new medium, its invention has lead critics and academics to…

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Today in GIFs: Get a look at Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor’s strange world

It’s been too long since we last checked in on Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, the game about exploring a grand sci-fi universe through the viewpoint of a lowly municipal worker rather than a more standard space marine hero figure. Since my original post covering the game, the team has been hard at work bringing the backwater trash-planet it takes place on to life, and recently, that work has paid off as a series of new GIFs and screenshots posted to the game’s official Tumblr. Since they give me an excuse to write about this adorable blue collar spin on…

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Two game artists share the Japanese yōkai that inspire them

After living in Japan’s seaside city of Niigata for a year, French artists Cécile Brun and Olivier Pichard learned, among many other things, an appreciation for the island nation’s mythology and art. They’ve told us about their visits to Buddhist spiritual sites on Japanese mountains, and as we’ve written before, the pair have a particular fondness for Japanese photographer Kotori Kawashima and his photobook Mirai-chan, which depicts a young girl living in Niigata’s Sato Island. “What interests us here is this juxtaposition of a very young girl from today and an ancient mysterious world,” they said. Since returning home to France, it has…

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Undungeon’s pixel art makes the fantasy genre fresh again

A point of honesty: I still have yet to play more than the first hour of The Witcher 3 (2015). Not because the game is bad—in fact, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen so far—but because at this point, I’m just too exhausted with fantasy to have much interest in delving any further. How many hours have I spent playing as men in armor swinging their swords at lumbering dragons? Or, in the case of science-fiction, playing as a space ranger swinging his light sword at insectoid queens? Granted, there are fantasy stories that work to subvert these tropes, as we’ve…